Chapter IV., VII._

Cade and his rebels took possession of London; but they were beaten in a battle and forced to quit the city. Cade and some followers continued to be turbulent and soon afterwards he was killed.

_J. Gairdner, Houses of Lancaster and York, chapter 7, section 6._

ALSO IN: _C. M. Yonge, Cameos from English History, 3d series, chapter 7._

ENGLAND: A. D. 1455. Demoralized state of the nation. Effects of the wars in France.

"The whole picture of the times is very depressing on the moral if not on the material side. There are few more pitiful episodes in history than the whole tale of the reign of Henry VI., the most unselfish and well-intentioned king that ever sat upon the English throne--a man of whom not even his enemies and oppressors could find an evil word to say; the troubles came, as they confessed, 'all because of his false lords, and never of him.' We feel that there must have been something wrong with the heart of a nation that could see unmoved the meek and holy king torn from wife and child, sent to wander in disguise up and down the kingdom for which he had done his poor best, and finally doomed to pine for five years a prisoner in the fortress where he had so long held his royal Court. Nor is our first impression concerning the demoralisation of England wrong. Every line that we read bears home to us more and more the fact that the nation had fallen on evil times. First and foremost among the causes of its moral deterioration was the wretched French War, a war begun in the pure spirit of greed and ambition,--there was not even the poor excuse that had existed in the time of Edward III.--carried on by the aid of hordes of debauched foreign mercenaries ... and persisted in long after it had become hopeless, partly from misplaced national pride, partly because of the personal interests of the ruling classes. Thirty-five years of a war that was as unjust as it was unfortunate had both soured and demoralised the nation. ... When the final catastrophe came and the fights of Formigny [or Fourmigny] and Chatillon [Castillon] ended the chapter of our disasters, the nation began to cast about for a scapegoat on whom to lay the burden of its failures. ... At first the unfortunate Suffolk and Somerset had the responsibility laid upon them. A little later the outcry became more bold and fixed upon the Lancastrian dynasty itself as being to blame not only for disaster abroad, but for want of governance at home. If King Henry had understood the charge, and possessed the wit to answer it, he might fairly have replied that his subjects must fit the burden upon their own backs, not upon his. The war had been weakly conducted, it was true; but weakly because the men and money for it were grudged. ... At home, the bulwarks of social order seemed crumbling away. Private wars, riot, open highway robbery, murder, abduction, armed resistance to the law, prevailed on a scale that had been unknown since the troublous times of Edward II.--we might almost say since the evil days of Stephen. But it was not the Crown alone that should have been blamed for the state of the realm. The nation had chosen to impose over-stringent constitutional checks on the kingly power before it was ripe for self-government, and the Lancastrian house sat on the throne because it had agreed to submit to those checks. If the result of the experiment was disastrous, both parties to the contract had to bear their share of the responsibility. But a nation seldom allows that it has been wrong; and Henry of Windsor had to serve as a scapegoat for all the misfortunes of the realm, because Henry of Bolingbroke had committed his descendants to the unhappy compact. Want of a strong central government was undoubtedly the complaint under which England was labouring in the middle of the 15th century, and all the grievances against which outcry was made were but symptoms of one latent disease. ... All these public troubles would have been of comparatively small importance if the heart of the nation had been sound. The phenomenon which makes the time so depressing is the terrible decay in private morals since the previous century. ... There is no class or caste in England which comes well out of the scrutiny. The Church, which had served as the conscience of the nation in better times, had become dead to spiritual things. It no longer produced either men of saintly life or learned theologians or patriotic statesmen. ... The baronage of England had often been unruly, but it had never before developed the two vices which distinguished it in the times of the Two Roses--a taste for indiscriminate bloodshed and a turn for political apostacy. ... Twenty years spent in contact with French factions, and in command of the godless mercenaries who formed the bulk of the English armies, had taught our nobles lessons of cruelty and faithlessness such as they had not before imbibed. ... The knights and squires showed on a smaller scale all the vices of the nobility. Instead of holding together and maintaining a united loyalty to the Crown, they bound themselves by solemn sealed bonds and the reception of 'liveries' each to the baron whom he preferred. This fatal system, by which the smaller landholder agreed on behalf of himself and his tenants to follow his greater neighbour in peace and war, had ruined the military system of England, and was quite as dangerous as the ancient feudalism. ... If the gentry constituted themselves the voluntary followers of the baronage, and aided their employers to keep England unhappy, the class of citizens and burgesses took a very different line of conduct. If not actively mischievous, they were solidly inert. They refused to entangle themselves in politics at all. They submitted impassively to each ruler in turn, when they had ascertained that their own persons and property were not endangered by so doing. A town, it has been remarked, seldom or never stood a siege during the Wars of the Roses, for no town ever refused to open its gates to any commander with an adequate force who asked for entrance."

_C. W. Oman, Warwick the King-maker,